Founders' Day!
by William Easley
Summary: June 15, 2017: It's the Mystery Twins' birthday-the older Mystery Twins, that is! And equally exciting, it's the day the New Ghost Harassers' episode about the Mystery Shack debuts! Join Dipper, Mabel, Wendy, and everyone else and party down, dudes! Merch in the Mystery Shack is twenty per cent off for one day only!


I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you.

* * *

**Founders' Day!**

* * *

**(June 15, 2017)**

Mabel had become a party planner _par excellence_, as they used to say in the old days when parties _meant_ something, when they went on for weeks at a time, sometimes, and they ended with only a few people still able to stand upright and move about under their own power.

This year the party for their Grunkles' birthday, which fell on Thursday, took on a whole new dimension. For one thing, they observed it at the Shack. For another, Soos had agreed to a promotion that ordinarily would have given Grunkle Stan nightmares: For that one day only, everything was 20% off! The upside was that everything was already priced about 120% higher than logic would decree reasonable, so the difference was hardly noticeable, and anyway, when merch was 20% off, customers were inclined to buy about five times too much.

Without fully realizing it, Mabel was in fact a latent marketing genius. Anyway, the Shack did not close down, but did a booming business, with a rotating staff to cover it. Dipper took two hours at the helm of the tram, then two hours off, conducting the Mystery Tours; Teek, since Soos was offering a free picnic lunch catered by the nice Willet couple, was off kitchen duty and instead became acting floor manager; Wendy gave killer Museum tours; and they rotated two-hour shifts with Stan (he loved being Mr. Mystery, so it was no imposition) and Melody, except nobody had to be on counter duty.

Nobody human, at least. That was because the Gnome Winziger, semi-retired from his job as a banker in the Crawlspace—and incidentally, a mathematical prodigy—came in to run the cash register. He was so quick at calculations that he only needed to glance at a basketful of tchotchkes to say instantly, "That's one hundred seventeen dollars and eleven cents, Madam, and an excellent selection! If I might make one small suggestion, the Tarot cards would perform even better on the enchanted roll-up layout board, made of dishwasher-safe high-density polyethylene and guaranteed to last for the lifetime of the product, today practically a steal at only $7.89, which would neatly bring your total up to $125.00." He always upsold the marks—uh, customers. And he was so fast that the one register served the purpose of two.

On top of an influx of tourists—Mabel had the foresight to buy some radio ad time to publicize Founders' Day at the Mystery Shack—invitations had gone out to just about everyone in Gravity Falls, including a few unorthodox non-humans. Chutzpar was there, and young Geetaur, who'd become a physical specimen that lady tourists wanted to have their photo taken with (and some even tucked slips of paper with phone numbers into his loincloth), representing the Manotaurs.

Tourists thought of them as incredibly muscular young men in very good costumes; they thought the same of the Gremloblin, who wore mirrored shades as nightmare preventatives and who, while not very sociable, did enjoy the music provided by Sev'ral Timez, Robbie and the Tombstones, and occasional amateurs, including Professor Fiddleford McGucket on banjo, whose performance of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" elicited whoops and cheers from quite sophisticated-looking visitors who later wondered why in the world they had behaved like that. But then some music just moves people.

As party generalissimo, Mabel had exempted herself from Shack duties, but she still managed to check with everyone and make sure the rotation went on without a hitch, so nobody got too tired. And without comment, she arranged it so Dipper and Wendy's break times always coincided.

As for Stan and Ford, they wandered around grinning and greeting, flattered because the townspeople really liked them—hey, what were little things like Stan's expunged criminal record or Ford's having created a Portal that very nearly ended the world compared to the nice things the two had done for the town, even though they rarely took credit?

Both, for example, had organized and largely funded the establishment of the Gravity Falls Medical Center, either an exceptional clinic or a well-run small hospital, that had brought emergency medical care and treatment to a town that previously had got by with only one GP and no overnight facilities for the sick and injured. Stan had quietly re-organized the Chamber of Commerce, using his personal business acumen to help every commercial enterprise in the town become more profitable. Ford had created a research institution that already was getting national attention.

And the two brothers had become the go-to resource for dealing with the inevitable outbreaks of weirdness. When something strange happened in the neighborhood, who were they going to call? The Pines brothers!

Anyway, once his single-minded drive to rebuild his brother's ruined Portal had culminated in success (though nearly in disaster), Grunkle Stan's oddball charm and indirect honesty had won him tons of friends. It helped that he'd married Sheila Remley, whom everyone liked. If Stan was good enough for her, they decided, he was good enough for anybody.

And Ford—it would be wrong to say everyone _liked _him. To tell the truth, everyone felt awe in his presence. They knew he was incredibly intelligent, because if you talked to him for five minutes, you realized you could understand only about a tenth of what he said. True, the same used to apply to Fiddleford, when he was Old Man McGucket, town kook, but in his case what he said just sounded crazy, while Ford's utterances sounded perspicacious, a word that 99% of Ford's friends would have to look up in the dictionary.

However, though he was undeniably smart, something about Ford elicited a certain protectiveness. Women tended to think, "This is a man who is so smart he's dumb about the small things in life, and he should be sheltered and cherished." It was lucky for Lorena, his wife, that she had got to him first. And guys—even people like the enormously strong Dan Corduroy, who was years younger than Ford, looked at him as the little brother who had to be defended against the hard knocks of the world.

Anyway, the two of them had a great time, talked and laughed and ate and drank, and felt accepted and valued—and if a birthday brings that feeling, one doesn't need much in the way of material gifts.

* * *

"How's your wrist?" Dipper asked Wendy on their first break as they took a stroll out past the end of the Mystery Trail and even beyond Moon Trap Pond.

She flexed her fingers. "Feels great. I'm gonna take off the wrist brace tomorrow. You OK? No lingering sheepishness?"

"Hey, if you're over being a wolf, I'm over being a sheep," he told her.

"Mmm, I don't know. Now and then, I get the urge to pounce on you."

Which she did, tumbling them both down in the high grass. They rolled downhill holding onto each other and laughing out loud. "Whoo!" Dipper said at the bottom of the slope. They'd wound up with Wendy on top, a position that suited him fine. "You know, when we first came to Gravity Falls, Mabel loved to roll downhill—I mean, we don't have the kind of grassy hill in Piedmont that you find here—and she'd just lie down and roll like a log. I thought she was silly."

"Mm, never tried it yourself?" Wendy asked, her breath warm on his face.

He stroked her back with his hands. "I just never knew what I was missing."

"Hey, hey, what's going on down there?" Wendy asked.

"Just making sure that your wolf tail's gone," he said innocently.

She kissed him. "Let's not start something we promised not to finish until you're eighteen."

"Right, right. Darn it."

After a few minutes they got up, took turns dusting each other off—leaves of grass tend to cling—and then they walked back to the Shack to take up their duties again.

Wendy talked about her dad and her brothers—Corduroy Lumber had recently incorporated formally, with Dan as President and Junior, now engaged and less rowdy and thoughtless than he had been, as Director of Operations, and the two younger brothers as apprentices. "Dad's got a lady who comes in every other day to clean and help cook, and I think they got something going," she confided. "Wouldn't surprise me if he re-married."

"How do you feel about that?" Dipper asked.

"I'm good with it. I really think it's what Mom would have wanted for him. Hey, Sunday you want to go with me up to the cemetery? It's time to do a little clean-up. I'd like to surprise Dad by taking care of it myself."

"I'm in," Dipper said. Wendy visited her mother's gravesite eight or ten times a year, often just to sit and commune and meditate. She insisted—and Dipper believed her—that her mom, Mandy Corduroy, approved of their engagement. Heck, he supposed everyone did—both the town doctor and the valley veterinarian wanted to come to their wedding!

Most of the town and half the Valley seemed to want that, too. Oh, well, they'd planned a very quiet civil ceremony for August, and then later they'd return for a renewal of vows and a church service. One way or another, he thought, they could accommodate everyone.

As to organizing it all—well, they'd just turn it over to Mabel.

* * *

The Shack closed for business at six. No one was hungry—everyone had snacked on the goodies that the Willets had kept providing all day long—and so everyone, from little Harmony to Grunkles Ford and Stan, went downhill to Stan's big TV room. They brought in chairs from all over the house and made up an audience. Dipper nervously set up his laptop and connected it to the big-screen TV.

This, for him, was the high point of the day.

When Dipper had everything ready, he said, "First, happy birthday to Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford, and thank you for being our grunkles and our best friends and for saving our butts whenever we need it."

"Your butt I could ignore," Stan said, "but Wendy's is too nice not to save."

Mabel cackled, "Good one!" but Sheila elbowed her husband in the stomach.

"OK," Dipper said. "This episode of 'The New Ghost Harassers' was released today. So it's about the Shack—"

"Yay!" Soos cheered.

"—and Wendy and Mabel and I may have a little part in it. So I hope you enjoy it. It's kinda cheesy, I guess, but it was my favorite show for years and years, and I'm glad it's back."

Using the big TV as a monitor, he logged into Webflix and found the "Documentary" category. There it was, sure enough: "The New Ghost Harassers, Episode 5: Oregon's Mystery Shack."

Internet shows had an advantage over network TV shows—for one thing, they didn't have to be censored according to Standards and Practices guidelines, and for another, they didn't have to run 46 minutes to make room for commercials. The new version of the show had thirteen more minutes of screen time per episode.

They watched and laughed. Grant and Jasyn, the Ghost Harassers, looking a little older than they had on the original show, but still afire with enthusiasm, interviewed Grunkle Stan, who wove tales of weirdness and strange phenomena with the sort of impish salesmanship that made you feel as if you were being conned, but enjoyably.

Soos was earnest and obviously a believer in ghosts and long-leggity beasties that went bump in the night. He implied that the Shack was home to specters, spooks, haunts, gaunts, orbs and shades and stuffed mermaids, oh my! Dipper felt pleased that Jasyn, who interviewed Soos, didn't make fun of him but instead asked questions with perfect gravitas. Soos asked, "Does my voice really sound like that, dawgs? Awesome!"

Wendy, by contrast, was down-to-earth—and the cameraman must have been half in love with her, because the shots of her showing the crew around the Museum and talking about the history of the place lingered on her, sometimes her face, sometimes her figure, trim in her green Mystery Shack blazer.

A little more than halfway through, Grant narrated some footage of the closet up in Dipper's room: "We suspected something odd was going on here, with this small closet as the center of strange feelings."

Jasyn added, "Our instruments were inconclusive, but sometimes you just know. That sort of back-of-the-neck sensation that you stand in the presence of something paranormal, right?"

"Oh, yeah. We've come to recognize that feeling. But nothing manifested here during our investigation, so we asked some young people who knew about the closet to come in to the studio. Let's see what they had to say."

And bang! There they were on stage with Dipper's childhood idols. It didn't even matter that much that a caption imposed under Dipper's face read "DIPPER PIES" as he explained that he and Mabel were the nephew and niece of Stanley and Stanford Pines, the CEO and builder, respectively, of the Mystery Shack.

It didn't bother him that again Wendy got more screen time than he did, or that Mabel's sometimes eccentric observations stayed in while some of his reasoned statements had been edited out.

"Hey, there it is!" he said. "We took that!"

On-screen, Jasyn was saying, "Later, Dipper Pines took this startling footage of the closet, revealing that we had been right in our judgment: Something is haunting this closet in the Mystery Shack!"

They showed only about twenty seconds of the video that Dipper had sent them, shot through special filters and revealing a blurry moving image of the Invisible Wizard—which Ford identified not as a ghost at all, but rather an interdimensional entity that seemed somehow to be stuck upstairs. He thought it was some sort of sentient or semi-sentient fungoid being, probably harmless.

The Ghost Harassers insisted it was a ghost, though—naturally. Or supernaturally, maybe.

Grant said, "We categorize this apparition as a Class 5 Spectral Manifestation. It does not appear to be evil, and its purpose we can't be sure of. But our thanks go to Dipper Pines for revealing that our investigation did indeed uncover something very bizarre there in the Mystery Shack of Gravity Falls."

"Pure gold," Stan said, rubbing his hands. "You can't buy this kind of publicity. Hey, Soos! You know the broom closet in the Museum?"

"Sure," Soos said.

"From now on, that's the Haunted Closet! Put up a sign, _As Seen on the Ghost Harassers Show!_ I want Dipper's, Mabel's, and Wendy's photos framed and hung up beside the door. Get pictures of those goofs from the show, Grant and Jacob—"

"Jasyn," Dipper corrected.

"—whatever, and if people wanna open the door for a chance of spottin' the ghost, charge 'em five bucks—"

"Twenty bucks!" Mabel interjected.

"That's my Pumpkin! Twenty-five bucks a pop."

"But Mr. Pines, I mean, Stan, there's not a ghost, like, in that closet, dude. Just brooms!"

"And there's no ghost in the attic closet, either," Ford said reasonably. "Just a fungoid monstrosity from beyond the bounds of space and time that we know. Nothing as exotic as a ghost."

"Yeah, Poindexter," Stan said. "You know that and I know that, but the rubes don't know that! This is a gold mine! A gold mine, I tell ya!"

Ford sighed. "Very well, I'll let you have this—as a birthday present."

"Aww, thanks," Stan said. "An' all I got you was a state-of-the-art stereo system for your car, now that you can finally drive it without wreckin' it once a day."

"You did?" Ford asked, blinking. "That's incredibly thoughtful of you!"

"Ain't it?" Stan agreed with a grin. "Hey, we still on for a cruise with the gals?"

"Oh, I hadn't mentioned that," Ford said. "Lorena, Stanley and I would like to take you and Sheila for a short cruise on the _Stan O'War II_ one weekend."

"I'd love it," Lorena said.

"Then it's settled. Well, this has been a very nice day."

"A great day, Brainiac!"

As the credits for "The New Ghost Harassers" rolled on the screen, Mabel said, "One more time, everybody! All together! One, two, three—"

And everyone yelled "Happy Birthday, Stanley and Stanford," even little Harmony.

The very next day a package arrived in the mail for Dipper—six DVD recordings of the Ghost Harassers episode, complimentary, all of them signed in permanent markers by the two stars of the show. Dipper gave both Stan and Ford one, one to Wendy, one to Mabel, and he kept two for himself.

"At last," he said to Wendy, sighing happily, "_something _turned out good for everybody, with no bad repercussions."

Right.

* * *

The End


End file.
